Interview with Nathan Gilmore (TeamGantt)

TeamGantt Easy way to schedule, track progress and share your projects with your team online. I interviewed Nathan Gilmore, TeamGantt founder to find out more.

This interview is the eighty seventh in a series of DW interviews. Big thank you to Nathan for the interview!

How would you describe TeamGantt in under 50 words?

Simple web based project scheduling software. You can plan out each task in your project and invite others to work on the project with you. You can even track your progress, upload files, and comment on tasks.

TeamGantt was co-founded in 2009 by you and John Correlli. What roles do you both undertake?

I do the design work and John handles all of the coding.

Tell us how it all started. Where did your inspiration for TeamGantt come from?

John’s family has a large commercial roofing company. We were working there writing custom software for their business and were planning out a lot of projects. We would use gantt chart software for this however it was all desktop based. I would create a gantt chart and email it to everyone or print it out. Then make updates and send it out again. It was getting tough to keep track of the latest versions. It was clear that a web based gantt chart would help us plan and track our progress in a more collaborative way. However, we couldn’t find any web based solutions. We thought that maybe if we built a solution for this that others would be interested in buying it.

What planning did you do before you started up?

The first thing we did was build a simple landing page explaining what we were planning on building. We put some pricing up that we thought we might use and had a place to collect emails for people that were interested so that we could notify them when we had something ready. We then used a $100 free Google Adwords coupon to run some ads to see if anyone would show any interest by giving us their email address. We were shocked when we got about 5 email addresses. That was enough to encourage us to keep going.

How long did it take to put together TeamGantt?

We worked Saturday mornings for about 6 months before we put out a beta product. We then worked another 6 months before we launched the paid version in the end of 2010. We are still adding new features and working every day to make it better.

Who do you see as your target audience? Any big clients on your list?

We have all types of companies using TeamGantt. Everything from creative agencies and startups to construction companies and teams from large corporations. Customers include teams from Twitter, Oracle, Expedia, Sony Entertainment, Time Warner, and others. It’s really a great tool for any business that has one or more projects that they want to keep track of.

Do you have any new features in the pipeline?

Always! Next up is the ability for users to sign up for a daily digest of what happened the day before. It’s just one more step in trying to increase how collaborative the software is.

How do you promote TeamGantt?

We have had a lot of success with SEO. Word of mouth has been great as well.

Has TeamGantt got the feedback and growth you expected since launch?

Much more than we could have expected. There seems to have been a real void in this market for a good web based project scheduling tool.

What’s the impact on your home life been like? Is it hard to maintain a work-life balance?

It was tough when we were working full time jobs and building TeamGantt on the side. The same year that we launched TeamGantt, we were both working full time jobs, my wife and I had a baby, and John was involved in helping his father through the construction of a new building for our church. We were spread pretty thin to say the least.

Now that we are full time with the business, life is actually much simpler.

Can you convince the reader to start using TeamGantt in under 50 words?

If you have a project that you are working on, it’s worth the free trial to test it out. So many people have been excited about how TeamGantt has been helping them get a grip on their projects.